The OrWa road trip diaries, Day 4: I see cheese, cross into Washington and flop in a silver bullet

She is a faded beauty, a 35-foot Spartan Royal Manor, parked in a grassy field near Cape Disappointment, Wash., complete with kitchen, bathroom and a bedroom with cool, curvy corners, so you never forget you’re in a trailer. She goes back to about 1954. And tonight I sleep between those curvy corners.

Len Atkins, owner of the unrelievedly miscellaneous and bohemian Sou’Wester Lodge, leads me to her through the dim dusk. About a dozen other trailers are parked on the three seaside acres around. There’s also a great big old farmhouse that Atkins and his wife, Miriam, have filled with artworks, books, dental equipment and some stuff that makes no sense at all.

“We came here to spend a weekend,” he says in a disarming accent from some corner of the British Empire. (I’ll have to ask which one tomorrow.) “My wife and I looked at each other and we said, ‘Wow, this is home.’ It had been on the market for three years. No one was touching it. From those two days, this September will be 29 years since we came.” He is clearly as happy as a pig in mud, and it’s infectious.

Still, it’s not for everybody, as Atkins is quick to warn anybody who inquires. But it seems like the right place for me tonight, my first night in Washington.

And how did I spent my last Oregonian hours? Well, I spent one of those hours watching a cheese assembly line in Tillamook. The ladies (looking down from the viewing platform, I didn’t see any men on the floor) all wore hairnets and white aprons. I kept waiting for somebody to start the “Laverne & Shirley” theme song, but they just kept moving those yellow bricks of creamy goodness down the line.

The Tillamook factory tour is not only the biggest thing for tourists in the city of Tillamook, but it’s also free — the best free thing I’ve done so far on this trip. And if you have kids, here are two dirty little secrets about the tour: It’s not really about cheese and (but if you have kids, you knew this already) it’s not really free.

It turns out that the farmers and processors of Tillamook make all sorts of dairy products, including fudge and ice cream. Thirty-eight flavors of ice cream, eagerly sold in the retail and restaurant areas neighboring the observation platform. (Picture the mother of all supermarket dairy departments.)

If you’re a kid, and it’s summer, and you’ve just been dragged away from the beach and into a factory to hear about how a bunch of dairy farmers got together to hire an inspector to improve quality control in 1909, well, walking out with a belly full of ice cream is a happy ending to beat all.

And what did I buy at the cheese factory? Um, a root beer float. Apparently I’m still a child inside. But maybe the trailer already gave that away.

– Christopher Reynolds, Los Angeles Times staff writer

[Photos: Top: In Wheeler, Ore., a bit south of Cannon Beach, 16-year-olds Jesse Miles and Andrew Welker revive the ancient Oregonian art of log rolling. Second: Another bowl of chowder (my third and best of the day) at the Depot Restaurant, Seaview, Wash. Third: It's the law: You visit the Oregon coast, you do the Tillamook cheese tour. Bottom: The Spartan Royal Manor, circa 1954 (aka my trailer at the Sou'Wester Lodge in Seaview). Credit: Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times]

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 17, 2009 at 12:41 pm by Christopher Reynolds and is filed under Family & Kids, Islands & Beaches, News, Tips & Advice, Oregon, Oregon Washington road trip, Outdoors & Adventure, Pacific Northwest, Summer, Washington. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.